The room measures nine feet long by six feet wide. Twenty-seven-old Johnny sits in the room with his hands on his head and thinks to himself: “Why am I here?” A plate of fried shrimp and an ice cold coca-cola sit uneaten on a small metal table while a man with a bible sits outside the room speaking in whispered tones. Two burly men appear dressed in crisp blue shirts and pressed gray pants; one says to Johnny, “It's time.”
Johnny was in the worst room imaginable. He was in prison, and he was in a deathwatch cell. His last meal on earth was served, and now it was time to die. Why did Johnny commit a crime that would have led him to this precarious situation? What factors of recidivism could lead a person like Johnny to spend most of his life in and out of jail?
The definition of recidivism is “a tendency to lapse into a previous pattern of behavior, especially a pattern of criminal habits” (Dictionary. Com). The three prevailing reasons for recidivism are; peer pressure, environment and past criminal history. For Johnny and countless others like him, jails and prisons are like a turnstile at a subway station. Jail becomes a coming of age ritual that takes hold and becomes part of one's being.
A child needs a sense of belonging in any environment. To be loved or to be cared for are the most primal of feelings for which a child yearns. By not obtaining love and attention at home, a child or young teen is most likely to seek it elsewhere. When a peer offers acceptance in the form of a dare, the bait of a crime is tossed and the tiny fish is hooked. A refusal to participate can lead to isolation; whereupon, inclusion is paramount to an already neglected psyche.
Here, our “dead man walking” Johnny, grew up in the rough and tumble housing projects of Red Hook Brooklyn. He lived with his mother who worked two jobs to provide the basic needs for him and his four sisters. Johnny's father was in prison where he had been locked up since Johnny was an infant. Role models of Johnny's youth consisted of drug dealers who wore gold on their teeth, sported the latest footwear on their feet, and had the fattest wads of cash in their pocket. In his environment, the combination of peer pressure and the allure of easy money were too great; in Johnny's world, education or crime were the first class tickets out of the projects.
Education requires dedication, commitment and the will to succeed. Amazingly, one could say the same thing about crime; therefore, one would need the dedication to chance arrest and go to jail, the commitment to chance conviction and go to prison, and having the will to succeed with the crime so one doesn't have to go to jail or prison.
By twenty-two, Johnny had racked up convictions for drugs, assault, robbery, and burglary. He had already spent ten of those years incarcerated in one form or another, and was now on the streets once again. His stubbornness and his unwillingness to conform to prison rules negated his chances to learn a trade while incarcerated. He was now a hardened criminal, and relegated to the same dismal existence he had seen so many times before. But what was he to do? Johnny, the ex-con, found work as a day-to-day laborer and he soon discovered that digging ditches for minimum wage was not to his liking. He decided that he needed to make one more score, a score that would help him get on his feet so he can try to go straight and fly right.
“This is a hold up; everyone get down on the floor!” Johnny barked. His crime partner Raul, leapt over the bank counter and scooped the money out of the cash drawer. Johnny saw movement out of the corner of his eye. He saw a shiny object emerge from a man's pocket. “Put your hands on your head. Do it now!” Johnny screamed. The man continued his movements, and then it happened.
The long walk down the narrow corridor to the execution chamber was surreal, and Johnny was thinking his last thoughts as a mortal on earth. He wished he never hooked up with that gang of losers. He wished he listened to his mother and went to school so he could go to college and leave the projects behind. He wished he had a life, with a job and a family of his own; but what he really wished most of all was that he didn't pull the trigger.
While walking down the hallway to deaths door, he imagined he saw the man from the bank. He saw an old man lying on his side. He had a book of Braille in one dead hand, and a silver money clip wrapped around five one dollar bills in his other. It was more bad luck for Johnny; the man was deaf.
The youth of America should always remember what a great country we live in. Even if they come from a broken home, live in an impoverished area, or make mistakes along the way, they can still choose their own destiny with a good educational foundation. There are over two million men and women incarcerated in the United States today. It does not matter if they are of any particular race, class or gender. If kids obeyed their parents or guardians, and stayed in school, the cycle of recidivism would stop and the executioner would be out of a job.
